ClearSilver – A fairly impressive templating system

Last week I stumbled upon a gem of a templating system. I accidently discovered ClearSilver as I was in the middle of developing a prototype web interface for a project at work. For years I’ve been looking for a C API that allows me to completely seperate my HTML content from my source code. Admittedly, I haven’t looked *that* much since I rarely do web application development in C these days.

As far as templating systems and frameworks go, ClearSilver has many similar qualities to PHP, ASP, JSP, and a slew of home-brewed solutions (ala Template::Toolkit, etc). The interesting thing about ClearSilver is that it is sort of language agnostic, in the sense that there are hooks for Perl, C, Java, Ruby, and a few others. I managed to port my project in C within a couple hours, and am interested to experiment with some other languages. Admittedly, the documentation and samples were a little sparse, but I managed to put a simple parsing engine in place relatively quickly. So far, I’m pretty impressed with this project and will post more details as I experiment more in the future.